New York, NY – Chabad Committee Formed to Help Rubashkin Defense

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Published on: Dec 30, 2008 at 04:18 PM

New York, NY – A group of Lubavitch Chassidim, members of the Chabad Jewish Community in Brooklyn, NY, is planning on monitoring the well being of Shalom Mordechai Rubashkin, imprisoned head of the Agriprocessors Kosher meat plant in Postville, IA.

The group, which has years of experience in assisting community members with legal troubles, turned their attention to Rubashkin six weeks ago. Called The Committee of Concerned Anash for Pidyon Shevuyim (Anash meaning Chassidim, Pidyon Shevuyim – the mitzva of redemption of prisoners) will focus on assisting the Rubashkin family.

The Committee is working with top lawyers for the best defense and a public relations group, and will be collecting funds for the legal defense and keeping the community involved.

In a press release sent to COLlive, they wrote: “The committee wants the public to know they are the official group to assist and aid the Rubashkins, endorsed by the family. The committee has years of experience in dealing with pidyon shevuyim cases, and now they have turned their attention to helping Sholom Rubashkin.”

Several members of the committee held a private meeting today (Sunday) at the offices of The National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education (NCFJE), a Brooklyn-based educational and humanitarian organization (which both Hecht brothers direct).

Following the meeting – of which COLlive was invited to photograph but not record – the committee held a press conference for the Lubavitch media in an effort to “call on the worldwide Lubavitch community to take action, get involved, and donate to the Rubashkin legal fund.”

Other Jewish groups are expected to speak out on behalf of Rubashkin, citing that “the case is now an attack against shechita.”

Rabbi Pesach Lerner of Young Israel and Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel of Agudas Yisroel are said to be planning a trip to Iowa to meet with Rubashkin in prison.

This Tuesday, lawyers from Grefe and Sidney will be visiting Crown Heights to meet with the committee and residents. They are scheduled to meet with Aron Rubashkin, patriarch and founder of the Agri plant.

“Lubavitch in Crown Heights, and around the world, needs to know – from S. Padre Island, Texas to Shanghai, China, Kosher meat was available because of the Rubashkins,” Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht said. “Any traveler, as well, benefitted from Rubashkin. This affects every single person that eats kosher throughout the world.”

A new committee has been formed to supervise efforts to secure the release of Shalom Mordechai Rubashkin, former CEO of Agriprocessors in Postville, IA • The group, which is comprised of individuals with years of experience in assisting community members with legal troubles, began assisting Rubashkin six weeks ago • ‘The Committee of Concerned Anash for Pidyon Shevuyim’ will focus on assisting the Rubashkin familly in all matters.

[“Anash” is an acronym that basically means members of the Chabad-Lubavitch community.” “Pidyon Shvuyim” means redemption of captives.]

The Committee is working with a team of top lawyers for the best defense as well as a public relations group, and will be collecting funds for the legal defense and keeping the community involved with the cause, Chabad.info was told.

In a press release sent to Chabad.info, the committee made the following statement: “The committee wants the public to know they are the official group to assist and aid the Rubashkins, endorsed by the family. The committee has years of experience in dealing with pidyon shevuyim cases, and now they have turned their attention to helping Sholom Rubashkin.”

Following the meeting the committee held a press conference for the Lubavitch media in an effort to call on the worldwide Lubavitch community to take action, get involved, and donate to the Rubashkin legal fund. The meeting was attended by reporters representing many chabad news outlets, including Chabad.info.

Other Jewish groups are expected to speak out on behalf of Rubashkin, citing that “the case is now an attack against shechita.”

Rabbi Pesach Lerner of Young Israel and Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel of Agudas Yisroel are said to be planning a trip to Iowa to meet with Rubashkin in prison.

This Tuesday, lawyers from Grefe and Sidney, one of the firms defending Rubashkin will be visiting Crown Heights to meet with the committee and residents. They are scheduled to meet with Ahron Rubashkin, patriarch and founder of the Agri plant.

“Lubavitch in Crown Heights, and around the world, needs to know – from S. Padre Island, Texas to Shanghai, China, Kosher meat was available because of the Rubashkins,” Rabbi Sholem Ber Hecht said. “Any traveler, as well, benefited from Rubashkin. This affects every single person that eats kosher throughout the world.”

Tuesday, December 2nd 2008 at 2:16pm

Until three years ago, Miriam Shear and her husband were philanthropists who had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jewish charities, supporting schools in Boca Raton, Florida, Memphis, and Louisville. They say that the Rubashkins’ strong-arm business practices drove them into bankruptcy.

The Shears had grown wealthy selling alarm systems and life insurance. As members of a small community of Orthodox Jews living in Memphis, they ran a successful kosher-food bank that served a few hundred Jewish families. Incensed at what they say were astronomical prices for kosher food—a three-pound block of cheese at Kroeger’s, the only grocery in town, cost $25—the couple decided to open a rival store in 2003. They called their business the Kosher Case Club. Hoping to expand into meat and poultry, Shear met with Heshy Rubashkin at Lubinsky’s annual kosher-food show in New York. But Heshy, who was already doing a brisk business with Kroeger’s, refused to sell to her, she says.

Shear found another distributor in Atlanta and began selling meat processed by two of Rubashkin’s competitors, Empire Kosher and Alle Processing, and chicken shipped from Canada. Shear says she was able to significantly bring down the price of perishable items—she sold cheese blocks for $16, and skinless, boneless chicken that went for $18 at Kroegers she sold for $8. Shear says that she quickly learned how easy it was to profit by creating competition in a niche industry in which prices were being kept artificially high. After the Memphis Jewish Journal featured her store in an article, she was so successful that customers began driving from as far as New Orleans to shop there. Soon, she began to receive calls from Jews in other parts of the South who wanted her to open additional stores. In Tampa, where the only kosher meat for sale came from Agriprocessors, grocers told her that shipments sometimes contained meat so discolored that it had to be thrown away. But if you complained to the Rubashkins, they told her, the orders would simply stop coming. Members of the Lubavitch sect told Shear something that has been corroborated by others: Their rabbis told them that they should only buy meat from Agriprocessors—nothing else was considered pure enough.

In 2005, Shear met with the regional representative for her Atlanta distributor, Hudie Lipszyc. She says Lipszyc had driven six hours from Atlanta because he needed to tell her something. The distributor warned her to get out of the kosher-food business, telling her, she says, that if she didn’t, the Rubashkins would retaliate.

She says he actually used the words, “They are going to squash you,” which turned out to be the same phrase two other people later used to describe the Rubashkins. And when she told Lipszyc she had no plans to close her store, he told her that she was actually in danger.

(Lipszyc tells the Voice that he did, indeed, warn Shear that she should leave the business, but he denies warning her specifically about the Rubashkins. He says he may have used the word “squashed,” but if he did, it referred to competition generally. He denies that his warning referred to physical danger.)

Incensed, Shear told Lipszyc that not only was she going to ignore his advice, but she planned to open another store in Detroit.

Before she moved to Detroit, however, she consulted with the vaad, the local rabbinical council there. Detroit had only one kosher grocery store, One Stop Kosher, and the meat counter in the back was run by Shlomo Luss, a Rubashkin distributor, who serviced the entire region. In Detroit, Agriprocessors meat was also the main source in town. Shear wanted to obtain permission from the rabbis before opening up shop. As she was driving back to Memphis, she received a phone call from the vaad: They gave her the go-ahead and assured her that she wouldn’t be treading on anybody’s territory.

The Shears immediately turned the car around and drove back to Michigan. They purchased a home, renovated a warehouse, and bought thousands of dollars’ worth of cash registers, freezers, and other equipment necessary to run a store.

In September 2005, a few weeks before they were going to open the branch, Shear got another call from the vaad: The distributor was taking her to a rabbinical court. Shear called the distributor. Shear says Luss threatened to spread a rumor that the Canadian chicken looked so clean because it was bleached, and that the meat she was going to sell didn’t hold up to kosher standards. Once again, she says, she was told that the Rubashkins would “squash” her. Luss couldn’t be reached for comment.

Soon, Shear’s friends began to tell her about rumors spreading in the community: that her meat lacked kosher certification. Shear scrambled to get a certification letter from the Orthodox Union. She tacked the letter up in her store. But the rabbinical court made things difficult, issuing the decision that she could sell meat only by the caseload, which she says made it almost impossible to do business. (The vaad disputed this at the time.) She ignored the decision and went ahead. But a month after opening, some distributors that she had lined up to stock the store with products suddenly stopped selling to her. Shear says they didn’t return her calls.

In July 2006, nine months after opening, the Shears shut the doors of their Detroit store. They were almost bankrupt. Their house went into foreclosure. They say they could barely afford to pay their children’s health insurance. They packed up 12 suitcases and moved to Israel, where Shear is working two part-time jobs to pay the bills. “We went from being very wealthy people to being totally financially devastated. And from something that started as a mitzvah,” she says, using the Hebrew word for “good deed.” “We went from being people who gave in the six figures of tzedakah [charity] to being totally wiped out. This has been a total nightmare.”

The Shears’ ordeal was well known in Detroit’s Jewish community and sparked an internal battle within the vaad itself. In September 2006, the Shears received a settlement of $160,000 from the distributor and the vaad. The settlement was just enough, she says, to make up for the salary she had lost during the year. In 2006, the Justice Department began an antitrust investigation into the entire kosher-meat industry.

Shear isn’t the only person who says the Rubashkins don’t always play fair. Simon Fields owns a kosher supermarket in South Florida. He says that when he stopped selling Rubashkin products five years ago, the local Lubavitch rabbi told his congregants to stop buying meat from his store because it was no longer kosher, even though he had a valid Orthodox Union certification.

Men in long black coats and women wearing stiff wigs crowd the benches of the courtroom at the Federal Building in Philadelphia. The room is packed, so the men remaining outside wait to take turns with the ones indoors.

Early on the morning of Monday, November 3, dozens of people had taken a charter bus from Crown Heights, the center of New York’s Lubavitch Jewish community. Even more had carpooled. They had come for the sentencing of Moshe Rubashkin, chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council (a powerful nonprofit) and former owner of Montex Textiles in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

When a still-unidentified arsonist started a blaze at the Montex plant in 2005, it burned down with 300 drums of hazardous chemical waste inside. Rubashkin subsequently pleaded guilty to illegally storing the waste, which had been transported from a textile factory his family owned in New Jersey. But the city says he refused to pay the $450,000 in cleanup until the EPA forced him to do so. Allentown’s city solicitor, Martin Danks, says the Rubashkins still owe millions of dollars in unpaid taxes.

Inside the courtroom, Rubashkin, an excitable 51-year-old man—his defense lawyer had claimed he was suffering from attention deficit disorder—listens in silence as a prosecutor blames him for endangering the people of Allentown with his carelessness. But when it comes time for him to speak, Rubashkin launches into a stream-of-consciousness oration—not about Montex or Allentown, but about the history of the Jewish community in Crown Heights, and about Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who is known as “the rebbe” to Lubavitch Jews, a revered rabbi who died in 1994

The next day—Election Day—Moshe Rubashkin is sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for illegally storing the hazardous waste.

It’s not his first felony conviction. In 2002, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison after writing $325,000 in bad checks from an empty Montex account. A few months after being released from prison, thousands elected him to lead the community council, where one of his most important jobs is helping to select the rabbis who certify the kosher standards for meat that comes into the neighborhood. And while Moshe had practically no hand in running Agriprocessors, his role in the community council makes his the face of the Rubashkins in Crown Heights.

They hire high-powered lawyers—a former Iowa U.S. attorney was handpicked as the Postville plant’s chief compliance officer after the raid. Representing Aaron Rubashkin on and off since the 2004 animal-cruelty scandal is the celebrated constitutional lawyer Nathan Lewin, who defended former president Richard Nixon in one of the 27 cases he has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Earlier this year, Lewin petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the Rubashkins’ contention that immigrants at the Agriprocessors distribution center in Sunset Park don’t have a right to unionize, because they are undocumented. Lewin’s argument involves overturning a national labor-relations board position and a prior Supreme Court decision affirming that right. (Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.)

The Rubashkins also have a slick PR team. In May, the Rubashkins hired Ronn Torossian of fancy Manhattan firm 5WPR, whose client list has included Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame as well as Paris Hilton.

(Please read the whole story on the website of the Village Voice…there are so many other victims)

Post Script:In a community where it is practically taboo to speak out against the Rubashkins, dissent is finding an outlet on the Internet. On the most popular blogs in Crown Heights (such as CrownHeights.info or Vosizneis.com), every news item about the Rubashkins is heavily debated, sometimes receiving hundreds of responses. The Agriprocessors crisis has exploded long-lingering conflicts about how an intensely religious person, who follows a code of “divine” law, should regard the rules of the larger society.

Some argue that the Rubashkins have a greater obligation to the people of Crown Heights than they do the laws of the United States.

COPS: JEW GUYS NEED TO TALK!

The New York Post

By REUVEN FENTON

September 22, 2008
Posted: 4:06 am
September 22, 2008

he NYPD is trying to settle a long-running dispute between two rival Orthodox Jewish patrol groups – and keep them from taking the law into their own hands – by uniting them into one police-supervised unit, The Post has learned.

The challenge is getting them to cooperate.

Shmira and Shomrim, private crime-patrol organizations in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, have been rivals since the late ’90s, when they split.

Shmira has agreed to the merger, which was proposed in June. Shomrim has refused.

The plan would create a united, NYPD-trained patrol group the department would supervise and partially fund, a source said.

Shomrim spokesman Binyamin Lifshits says the group is concerned that the NYPD would monitor all emergency calls – including private matters like domestic disputes, which the Orthodox community wants to settle on its own.

But Shomrim’s larger objection is with Shmira, which Shomrim has accused of trying to sabotage its operations by slashing patrol-car tires, making prank emergency calls and falsely informing on Shomrim to the police.

“We don’t sit down with Shmira,” Lifshits said of his rivals, which split from Shomrim in 1999 after certain members were thrown out for alleged past criminal activity.

“The police are trying to twist our arms to work with them. This we cannot accept.”

But Yossi Stern, 38, the director of Shmira, laughs at claims made against his group.

“It’s all a bunch of rhetoric. Show me a police report,” he said. “We’re not out to harass anybody. We’re out to do a service for the community.”

The NYPD has long been frustrated with both patrols. It came to a head this year on April 14 when a member of Shmira attacked the black college-student son of a police officer.

11:00AM EST: Two troubled teenagers from Crown Heights, Brooklyn have been arrested and are in custody in the Town of Fallsburg, YWN has learned.
The two teens were apparently standing in front of Gombos Bakery on South Fallsburg’s Main Street early Friday morning – and were displaying drugs to a vendor selling flowers in front of the store.
When the vendor told the teens to put the drugs away and kindly move away, the teens assaulted him.
The Fallsburg PD responded, and although the teens had fled the scene and dropped the drugs, officers located them – along with the drugs – and placed them under arrest.
Catskills Hatzolah responded for the victim assaulted, who was treated for facial trauma.
The two boys are currently in the Fallsburg jail-cell, and were arraigned by a Fallsburg judge a few moments ago. Sadly, the boys – who claimed that they are “homeless” – were not cooperative with the judge – who raised the $2,000 bail price for both boys. One was raised to $5,000, and one was raised to $2,500. The boys were charged with 3rd Degree Assault, and criminal possession of marijuana
Fallsburg Police Chief Simmy Williams tells YWN that he has reached out to a representative from Kosher Coaching, and other community ‘Askanim’ to ensure that the teens get the proper help they need.
“These are obviously troubled teens who need help getting their lives back together,” Chief Williams said. “The law was broken, and a judge will deal with that, but they still need help – and that’s why I made sure to reach out to the appropriate organizations.”
Additionally, Chief Williams told YWN that Main Street in the Town of South Fallsburg is under 24hr surveillance with cameras, which helps the police department with many crimes.

Patrolling the Streets, and Dissing the Rivals

By ALEX MINDLIN

Published: June 1, 2008

The New York Times

IN mid-April, a young black man in Crown Heights was struck with a baton and sprayed with Mace by two white men, according to the police, and ever since, tensions have run high in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Jews and blacks who live there eye one another warily, and police patrols and surveillance have intensified.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Yossi Stern of Shmira, a Jewish citizen patrol group whose competition is another patrol group.

But there is another split on these streets, not between Jews and blacks but between Jews and Jews. The feuders, paradoxically, are neighborhood patrol groups that officially aspire to keep the peace.

Jewish patrols exist in several New York neighborhoods, like Brooklyn’s Borough Park, but Crown Heights is the only area that has two such competing patrols. Their names, Shomrim and Shmira, both derive from the Hebrew word meaning “guard,” but the two groups fiercely resent each other nonetheless.

“Shmira has a litany of things about Shomrim that they say they did wrong,” said Dov Hikind, an assemblyman who represents several other heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. “As for Shomrim, when I met with them, they said, ‘We have a file about Shmira.’ ”

Aron Hershkop, the coordinator of Shomrim, said that Shmira members had intimidated his volunteers, falsely informed on them to the police, and even jammed their radios with shrieks, beeping sounds and what he described as “Christian music.”

Yossi Stern, the director of Shmira, denied these accusations, saying, in effect, that Mr. Hershkop was a sore loser with a weakening organization.

Shmira and Shomrim were once a single group, but they split apart roughly a decade ago and, predictably, disagree over the reasons why. They also display a sibling-like rivalry. Mr. Hershkop said that he put a patrol car on the street in 2006, complete with flashing roof lights and the Shomrim logo, but pulled it off a month later when Shmira introduced its own car.

“I don’t want people to think I’m the Shmira,” he said. “Their whole motive is to be like us.”

Tensions have been stoked by an anonymous blog called “Who Is Shmira?” featuring posts and comments that are virulently anti-Shmira and strongly favorable to Shomrim.

Mr. Hikind said he had been urging the two groups to reunite. “There is no reason in the world why there should be two groups of people involved in patrols,” he said.

But Mr. Hershkop resisted, explaining: “When people come and tell me to make peace with them, I say, ‘To me, they don’t exist anymore.’ ”

The feuding patrol groups have surfaced in the recent tensions in Crown Heights. Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, has mentioned Shmira’s name in connection with his investigation into the assault on April 14. By contrast, Mr. Hynes, who has convened an investigative grand jury to look into the attack, praised Shomrim, calling the group “established” and “respectable.”

Mr. Stern has denied any link between Shmira and the attack.

And the feuding continues.

“It’s a real shame, an embarrassment for myself and the public,” said Rabbi Israel Shemtov, who is sometimes credited with founding the group that preceded Shomrim and Shmira. “I said to them, ‘I’ll lock both of you in a room, and don’t come out until you work it out.’ ”